so ive been sitting at around 5wpm for like three months now and i feel like im stuck. i can copy most letters if i really concentrate and the sending is slow enough but anything faster than maybe 6 or 7 wpm and my brain just completely falls apart. i miss a letter and then im trying to remember what i missed while the next letter is coming in and then i miss that one too and it just snowballs.

i started with the koch method on lcwo.net and i got through most of the characters but somewhere around character 30 or so i just kind of stalled out. ive been doing maybe 20 minutes a day. is that enough? should i be doing more? a guy at my club said he learned by just jumping on the air at 20wpm and copying what he could but that sounds absolutely terrifying to me right now.

anyway just wondering what worked for people. i really want to get to at least 20wpm eventually, i dont need to be a contest operator or anything but i want to be comfortable ragchewing on 40m cw

the snowball thing you described is totally normal, almost everyone hits that wall. the trick that actually worked for me after years of stalling was to stop worrying about copying every single letter and just let the ones you miss go. sounds counterintuitive but your brain needs to learn to stay in the present instead of panicking about what just went by.

also 20 minutes a day is fine but consistency matters more than duration. i did 15 minutes every single morning for about 8 months before i really felt comfortable around 15wpm. the jump from 15 to 20 came faster than i expected once i got there.

and honestly the guy at your club isnt wrong about jumping on the air, but maybe start by just listening to the qso partners calling cq on 40m without trying to respond. just copy practice with real signals. you'll be surprised how much easier it gets when theres a purpose to it. the 7.050 to 7.060 range in the evenings usually has some slower stuff going on.

im pretty much in the same boat as you lol, sitting around 8wpm right now and the lcwo lessons feel like they've slowed way down for me too. one thing that helped me recently was just grabbing a bunch of old QST magazines and having my computer send me the text as morse while i follow along with my eyes. kind of like cheating but it helped my brain start recognizing the rhythm of whole words instead of individual letters, at least thats how it feels to me

also someone on here told me about the word "paris" being used to measure wpm and i went down a rabbit hole about that for like an hour instead of actually practicing haha